apologetics theology culture worship

[This week I had the honor of writing a guest post for one of my favorite blogs, christianmomthoughts.com by Natasha Crain. Be sure and subscribe to her blog for great parenting advice on how to teach apologetics to your kids!]

As a worship leader and as a parent, I have a deep desire to help equip my kids to approach God with genuine worship that is insulated from the secular influence of the culture they are growing up in. This is no easy task.

To secularize something means to remove anything from it that has to do with God or religion. It’s no secret that our society is becoming more and more secularized by the day. American secularism, in particular, is very “me” focused. Everywhere our kids turn, they are met with messages like, “Follow your heart!” and “Believe in yourself!” and “You can be anything you want to be!” With God removed from the picture, these messages can be very enticing.

Such messages are focused on self-examination and self-affirmation, resulting in an experienced-based understanding of reality. Good doesn’t get defined by what God says is good, it becomes defined by what feels good. In other words, if it feels good to me, it is good.The attitudes and influences of secularism can even creep into our kids’ worship, so as parents, we need to be vigilant in helping them understand that our worship should be God-centered, not “me”-centered.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a very emotive worshiper. Connecting our emotions with God’s truth is a beautiful thing, and I want my kids to experience all the benefits of worshiping God. However, it’s vital that we first define worship correctly:Christian worship seeks to glorify God, while secularized worship seeks to glorify ourexperience of worshiping God.Read more at christianmomthoughts.com

Every once in a while, I hear the claim that America is not in any sense a Christian nation, and did not have Christian beginnings. It's true that we have never had an official state religion, which is one of the things that makes America great—freedom of religion for all people. However, it was the Judeo-Christian values of our founders that allowed for this freedom in the first place.

​Nothing makes this more evident than when we celebrate Thanksgiving. Why? Let me tell you a little story.

Mary had a little lamb — and a mission. ​

​In the late 1700’s, there was a little girl from New Hampshire, who was homeschooled in a time when women were not allowed to attend college. She was quite intelligent, and at eighteen years old she began to teach school and write poetry. Six years later, she married a lawyer who believed in her talents and challenged her to pursue intellectual endeavors.

​There’s nothing like grabbing a cup of coffee, sitting down to read your Bible, only to be confronted with a verse like Judges 21:20, 21:

Then they commanded the Benjamites: Go and hide in the vineyards. Watch, and when you
see the young women of Shiloh come out to perform the dances, each of you leave the
vineyard and catch a wife for yourself from the young women of Shiloh, and go to the land of
Benjamin.

Excuse me. What? In the Bible, men were told to catch wives for themselves?

When my faith was challenged a few years ago, I was stunned to hear the claim that we do not have any original New Testament documents, and the handwritten copies (manuscripts) we do have, are riddled with over 400,000 mistakes. Considering that I had lived my whole life believing the Bible is the Word of God, I found this rather unsettling.

​In my years of studying apologetics, several themes tend to pop up over and over again. This post will address the 5 questions I think every Christian needs to be aware of, and be able to answer.

All of these questions require further commentary, and I plan to write a blog post to respond to each one individually in the future. (As I post them, I will link them below.) For now, I will offer some "barebones" quick answers that can easily be committed to memory.